US approves less-invasive heart defibrillator

September 29, 2012

(AP)—The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it has approved a first-of-a-kind heart-zapping implant from Boston Scientific that that does not directly touch the heart.

Implantable defibrillators use thin wires to send electrical signals that disrupt dangerous heart rhythms. Surgeons have traditionally connected the wires to the heart through a blood vessel in the upper chest.

The new device from Boston Scientific uses wires that sit just below the skin's surface and do not need to be threaded through the heart's blood vessels.

Boston Scientific Corp. acquired the device through a $150 million buyout of Cameron Health. Under the terms of the deal, Boston Scientific will pay an additional $150 million for FDA approval, plus up to $1 billion in payments based on future sales figures.

Related Stories

(AP) -- Federal health officials have approved a first-of-a-kind artificial heart valve that can be implanted without major surgery, offering a new treatment option for patients who are too old or frail for the chest-cracking ...

Recommended for you

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, have developed a template for growing beating cardiac tissue from stem cells, creating a system that could ...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, have shown how a radioactive agent developed in the 1960s to detect bone cancer can be re-purposed to highlight the build-up ...

Researchers have long had reason to hope that blocking the flow of calcium into the mitochondria of heart and brain cells could be one way to prevent damage caused by heart attacks and strokes. But in a study of mice engineered ...

A protein that targets the effects of a faulty gene could offer the first treatment targeting the major genetic cause of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), according to research funded by the British Heart Foundation ...